Put your Performance in the Petri-Dish

I couldn’t sleep.

There was an owl somewhere. Traffic noise. And somebody hot in the bed.

My mind was busy, overthinking things that needed thinking through. But not at 1 AM. 

Plus, on Mondays my ankle hurts most. Ibuprofen helps. Wine helps more. But I’d run out of one and forgotten to imbibe the other.

I play touch rugby on Mondays and a combination of hard ground, old injuries and older ligaments results in soreness. But it’s a fair price to pay for something I enjoy.

It’s not serious. 

The youngest player is 17 and the oldest is 70; a rag-tag group seeking 90 minutes of athleti-fix to either show off their skills or re-live their prime. The pace and fitness of the young counterbalances by the wisdom and guile of the old.

I'm now East of centre on that continuum.

Teams pick themselves through a kind of Brownian motion until there’s roughly even numbered sides. Suddenly, somebody kicks a ball skyward to signal the start and joints spring and creak in to action.

Some weeks games are even. Others it’s a one-sided white wash. 

We play for fun but secretly I hate losing and on Monday night we were washed white. 

Playing with random friends, acquaintances and strangers is interesting. The team dynamic thrives or fails on the simplest of things. So much so that my insomniac mind went to town last night on the reasons why sometimes we're thrashed and sometimes we're the Harlem Globetrotters.

And here’s what it thinks.

Chemistry is eerie

There are people in teams that you have an eerie chemistry with. You know what each other is going to do despite hardly knowing each other. On the same team, you’re unstoppable together - working magic that oughtn’t be possible. .

"When you lose, there’s generally low chemistry."

On opposite sides you simply cancel each other out because you somehow understand each other's thoughts and subtle biomechanics so well. 

It's really easy to work out who you have chemistry with but hard to know why.

Confidence is slippery

The way you approach a game has as much a bearing on the result as the skills you possess innately. Even the most talented people let themselves down by wearing the wrong head on game day. 

"Performance and confidence are reciprocal bedfellows."

And, as easy as it is for confidence to flow when things go right, it’s much easier for confidence to evaporate into the ether when things go wrong.

Communication is currency

Of all the skills you need to perform as a team, communication is the most valuable. It’s the common currency of performance. Sure, you need talent and fitness. Your players need to cover a range of roles. You need a dollop of luck. 

"Ability with poor communication is a disability."

But without communication, nothing works. 

Nothing.

How do you know if you're On-Form?

You hear sports teams and athletes talk about ‘form’. Weirdly, you rarely hear businesses or colleagues at work complaining of being 'on form' or 'out of form’. It seems that ‘form’ is something preserved for environments where results are measured viscerally - where there’s a visible, real-time score that provides gratification or disappointment.

In sport the scoreboard is brutal. 

In business, there are too many hiding places - meaning that form gets hidden too.

My equation for form is C x C x C. 

Form = Chemistry x Confidence x Communication

If you were to give a 1-10 score to each of the C’s, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that the maximum score is 1000.

But the slightest drop in one ‘C’ has a dramatic effect on performance.

9 x 9 x 9 = 729. That’s >25% performance reduction for simply being a 9/10 in each C.

And Chemistry and Communication are the worrying ones. They depend on nodes of connection (noc) between team members - the more people (p) you have, the greater chance of a failure. 

The maths makes this a near exponential problem to solve:

noc = p (p - 1) / 2

With a squad of 20 players, there are 190 possible points of failure where Chemistry or Communication might let you down.

Last season, the Rugby team I support finished top. Somehow, this season, they’re 9th out of 12. The overall team is similar if not better on paper than last year - but they’ve plummeted from top to near bottom.

All 3 C’s have slipped from 9 or 10 right down to 5.

5 x 5 x 5 = 125. That’s 125 out of a possible 1000 or 12.5% of form potential.

The season before, the top side in the league who won the treble the previous year suffered the same fate. Top to bottom in a heartbeat.

In both cases, the Chemistry and Communication were off. Which affected results. Which affected Confidence.

Form just plummeted in a vicious cyclone.

Having hallucinated on this during my twilight insomnia - what's my point....?

1. That teams should do more to nurture the chemistry between players - be conscious of chemistry and pick teams based on it.
2. That communication is a skill not specifically taught in schools as a subject - but which has a huge impact on everyday performance. Why don't we teach it?
3. That confidence needs to start high and be underpinned by good Chemistry and Communication - otherwise it will erode fast. And if confidence starts low, you’re screwed.

Yesterday I spent time with somebody I've worked very closely with in the past. The C's aligned instantly and I can't wait to start working with her again.

Tomorrow, a former colleague is flying over to spend 2 days with us in our office. Three weeks back he did the same and despite a 12 year gap working together, the C's immediately aligned. Again, I'm super excited about working with him.

I can already feel my form shifting.

Browney. In motion.